Somber morning

So we did the requisite sight-seeing this morning. First, the Royal Palace which miraculously is one block from our hotel (god, I'm good). The main attraction, or at least the one we knew about, is the Silver Pagoda. We were at a loss, however. We could not find a silver pagoda anywhere. An emerald buddha (looking very similar to the jade buddha in the Imperial Palace in Bangkok), scads of other buddhas, stupas at every turn, and a bunch of other pagodas, but where was the silver one? Turns out the silver pagoda is named such because a section of the floor has silver tiles....well honestly the whole thing could be silver tiles but 90% of the floor is covered by rugs, so who can tell? Anyway, having checked that off the list we proceeded to find a tuk tuk (like that is hard!) to take us to the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng Prison. Pretty depressing but it would have seemed rather disrespectful not to go.
I bought a kindle book right before we left called 'When Broken Glass Floats' written by a woman who was a young child during the Khmer Rouge Regime so I knew more than I did a month ago, but she was not writing about these particular atrocities as she and her family were run out of Phnom penh during the 'liberation' and forced into slave labour in the mountains. It is simply staggering what evil human beings are capable of perpetrating.
Now my interest is in what motivated the Vietnamese - just recovering from their own war/conflict - to come to the aid of the Cambodians. I understand that the current Prime Minister of Cambodia (previously one of Pol Pot's lieutenants) fled to Vietnam to petition for assistance in over-throwing the Regime. But if the Vietnamese did so for truly altruistic reasons (and I'm a cynic at heart which is why I want to understand more), then I commend them for stepping in when nobody else did.
On a lighter note, we have an update on the Johnny Walker gasoline dispensing situation. It makes sense to be able to watch someone pour one liter of gas into your tank if you are only buying one liter of gas because spitting that much out of a regular gas pump would seem silly. But our tuk tuk driver today pulled into a regular gas station (like our taxi driver did yesterday in Siem Reap). He only bought a small amount of gasoline but there was a big, plastic bag of snacks sitting next to the pump (chips, cookies, sunflower seeds, etc) and the attendant tossed him one of those too. Now that we think of it, the taxi driver was given a bottle of water. So we are thinking that the actual gas stations, in competing with the 'Johnny Walker' gas stands, must have seen a need for offering a value added service (kind of like the free beer with the Fish Pedicures) and must promote a 'buy x liters of gas and get a free snack' offer - kind of like a Happy Meal! Capitalism and free enterprise at work.